Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 precipitated a devasting war and Europe’s most profound security crisis since the Second World War. It also triggered a major shock to the global economy, with dramatic rises in the prices of energy, food and fertilisers. The determined response by Ukraine and its Western backers created military dynamics that rendered a negotiated solution a distant prospect. Yet in the first few months of the war an ambitious mediation facilitated by the UN and Türkiye produced parallel agreements known as the ‘Black Sea Grain Initiative’. Over the next year the safe passage of commercial ships through a heavily mined war zone proceeded without incident. The extension of the initiative became increasingly fraught, but nearly 33 million tonnes of grain were exported to 45 countries, helping reduce and stabilise spiralling global food prices.

The effort was innovative on several fronts, but in some respects also a classic mediation. It was innovative in engaging conflict parties aggressively pursuing military campaigns against each other on economic and humanitarian issues with no direct bearing on their fighting. As in any negotiation, however, it was structured around proposals that could appeal to the interests of each side: Ukraine stood to gain from a renewed flow of export revenues, and Russia to counter perceptions that its actions were damaging already fragile economies in Africa and the Middle East. That each would play ball was by no means assured. Ukraine feared exploitation by Russia of the opening of its ports. Russia insisted on UN support for its efforts to export its wheat and fertilisers in return for easing the blockade it had established in the Black Sea. This led to the pursuit of two separate but parallel processes, one addressing the grain shipments through the Black Sea and the other Russia’s own agricultural exports. The dual track represented the mediation’s most distinctive innovation, but also its principal vulnerability.

The mediation rested on effective and unusual partnerships, mobilised at speed. The UN Secretary- General, António Guterres, and his senior officials drew upon actors from around the UN system, the private sector and civil society. Among the latter, HD had been present in Ukraine since 2014 and had a network of contacts attuned to agricultural conditions within the country as well as the impacts of rising food prices internationally. With access to the UN at the highest levels, it engaged with the Secretary-General’s office as the initiative was taking shape and provided support as the pace of work picked up.

Guterres pitched an outline of the eventual deal when he visited Ankara and then Moscow and Kyiv in April 2022. He charged two UN Task Forces to take forward discussions, one on Ukrainian grain shipments through the Black Sea (led by the Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths), and the other on the access of Russian food and fertilisers to the global market (led by Rebecca Grynspan, Secretary-General of the UN trade and development body, UNCTAD). Türkiye was uniquely placed to complement the UN role, drawing on the hard leverage of its geostrategic position, as well as the strong relations maintained by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and its own significant interests in the success of the initiative.

The warring states could not be expected to sit down together, which meant that the final deal required parallel agreements of each with the UN and Türkiye, signed in Istanbul on 22 July 2022. The parties established a Joint Coordination Centre to be staffed by the UN and nationals of Russia, Türkiye and Ukraine. In a separate Memorandum of Understanding agreed with Russia, the UN Secretariat committed to promoting the access of Russian food products and fertilisers to the world market. Russia’s unhappiness with the pace of its implementation would shadow negotiations about the extension of the grain deal in the year to come. On 17 July 2023 these culminated in its decision to pull out, and therefore the deal’s collapse. But back in Istanbul a year earlier, Guterres, flanked by President Erdoğan, had been justified in welcoming the Black Sea Grain Initiative as ‘a beacon of hope on the Black Sea’.